The present invention relates generally to safety devices, and more particularly to a hand portable monitoring device for monitoring personnel presence at a location.
As the number of employees increases for a business, it becomes more difficult to remember or keep track of which employees have come to work, or who has left the building on business or illness. Confusion as to which employees were present in a building at the time of a disaster is one of the foremost obstacles to the work of emergency personnel, and presents several distinct problems. Lack of awareness that everyone is out of the building may result in unnecessary searching by the emergency personnel of dangerous areas. Not only is this undesirable because it wastes time and effort sorely needed elsewhere, but it furthermore exposes the emergency personnel to unnecessary dangers. The work of emergency personnel is dangerous, and searching for victims in a building which is burning or structurally unstable can result in the injury or even death of emergency personnel. Where there are no victims to be helped by the search, this risk is unacceptable.
Conversely, in some cases emergency personnel may mistakenly believe that a person is safe who is actually trapped in the building. This can happen, for instance, if the disaster occurs on a day on which the person in question normally does not work, but the person has come to work overtime. In cases such as these, emergency personnel may fail to aid a person in need as a simple result of being unaware that the person is present. Loss of life may flow as an unnecessary consequence, merely because of poor information.
The aforementioned problems have been of substantial concern to the emergency rescue community for some time and continue to grow in significance. Buildings in modern cities continue to reach new scales of grandeur and are now the workplaces of thousands of employees. The potential chaos that can result from disaster striking a building of such size is apparent.
The seriousness of poor information increases with the size of buildings for several reasons. First, the task of manually tracking the presence of personnel becomes more difficult when the number of people involved increases. Second, the potential danger to emergency rescue operations may increase proportionally. Third, the likelihood of disaster in a larger building may be higher because, for instance, there are more people in potential danger. The aforementioned factors are particularly alarming in the light of increased terrorist activity against the civilian population of the United States. The Oklahoma City Bombing and the destruction of the World Trade Center in particular demonstrate that terrorists may specifically target the very buildings that pose the most serious threat. Accordingly, it is of the utmost importance that systems be devised which make personnel presence readily available to emergency personnel.
Some companies use manual punch timecard systems to keep track of employee presence. Other companies have made or are making the transition from manual timecard systems to a computerized time clock system comprising a data collection device and a data processing device. The data collection device collects personnel presence data, for instance through the use of wallet-sized electronic identification devices, and sends the data to the data processing device for storage and processing.
Unfortunately, in such systems the personnel presence data is only available by workstation access to the data processing device. Moreover, in an emergency, the data is often inaccessible because the power is out and the data processing device is disabled. Even if the power isn't out, it will likely be impracticable to take the time necessary to extract the data from the data processing device. Therefore, a need exists to devise a system for quickly and conveniently providing accurate information as to which employees were present at a location at the time of a disaster.